Episode three — How they lived

The jury had listened to a recorded police interview. It had listened to three expert witnesses over the better part of a week. Asked afterwards what had decided it, the jurors said none of that. They said the notebook.

Three years and three months passed between the indictment and the trial, and part of the reason is written down: both sides went to the judge and said they needed a year on their own simply to get through the computer files. This episode is that wait, the fifteen days in court that ended it, and the years since.

It is also the only time Julie Schenecker has answered for it out loud. In April 2015 a Tampa reporter was let through the gates of the women's prison in Marion County with a camera. Her account of that evening does not match the arrest affidavit, and her answer to the question the whole interview was moving towards is four words long. The detective who had sat opposite her on the morning of the twenty-eighth was asked the same things, and disagreed with all of it.

There is also a father who has spent fourteen years asking to be allowed to talk about something else.